At 06:21 PM 15/03/2007, you wrote:
>I think Terrill nailed it.
>
>Granted, I may not read as much "noir" fiction as
some of you but I
>don't actually see much change in it, beyond a
growing popularity
>that apparently has as much to do with nostalgia as
anything.
But as a group, Rara Avians have a strong attraction to a
form that preceded ourselves even as individuals. We are
traditionalists, and inclined to discount new offshoots as
not being the real thing. Someone recently declared a strong
dislike for too many pop-cultural references in a discussed
work, for instance, dismissing it as so much po-mo quackery.
We don't like po-mo here, though there's no reason a story
cannot be po-mo and noir at the same time, so far as I can
tell.
Anyway, I thought the suggestion of Motherless Brooklyn as
indicting a different direction was good. It used the
hard-boiled vernacular of an orphaned Tourrette Syndrome
sufferer to tell a dark story about how culture itself works.
Using the crime writing form to investigate cultural
obsessions is also part of Paul Auster's style, in The New
York Trilogy. The difficulties of investigating meaning from
the inside is an advance, if not an innovation, though the
Trilogy goes back to the 80's and maybe doesn't qualify as
recent. It maybe doesn't qualify as influential either, at
least in our circle.
The other thing is that television and cinema long ago
displaced written text as the popular means of consuming
fiction, but Rara Avis restricts itself to books, discussing
telly & the flics only in connection to published text.
It seems probable that new directions might appear in the
undiscussed media first, and then in books. Certainly there
has been a long-standing trend in printed fiction to adopt
styles that suit generations accustomed to receiving
information via electronic media. The short-hands and
vernaculars seem to get explored there first. Mostly. I
think.
Oh god! We're just a bunch of old fogeys!
Sorry, Kerry
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